foibles, fables and follies

Tag Archives: sketches

Today I did something I have not done in a very long time. I opened my sketch book.

I haven’t drawn anything – yet. Sketching terrifies me and always has. Despite design school, despite being encouraged and taught and even graded on my creativity and sometimes my sketches, despite 6 years of communicating my ideas through sketches, despite an entire summer in Europe filling a sketch book, despite all the practice I have, I am still terrified. And I’m not really sure why. I passed all my classes; no professor ever told me my sketches were terrible. I was told other parts of my design process were not up to par, but that’s pretty much required for design school. Ask any designer, they will agree. I own a lot of sketchbooks, but as I was looking through them again to write this, I discovered that the vast majority of them are less than half full.

The image today is one of my sketches. Don’t bother telling me whether or not you think it’s good – I wouldn’t have posted it if I didn’t think it was appropriate for public consumption. It’s from the Europe trip, by the end of which I had several passable sketches. I love looking through that sketchbook, there are so many memories locked in the unassuming little black book. And by the end of the trip, I was getting pretty good. I filled many sketchbooks that summer, and it’s quite possible I haven’t sketched since.

The first page is the hardest. That blank page looking back at me, judging me for the awful sketches I’m bound to scratch out. So I usually just close the book, leave it for another day. But today – today I’m tired of leaving it blank. I still don’t know where to start, so I will do what I’ve always thought was the best thing for the first page of a sketchbook – a big fat slash. So there. I put something in my sketchbook.